How Do You Balance Both Your Family And Your Job?
You work hard, you care about your family, and you want to make sure that everything is taken care of at the end of the day. But the question always lingers....how do you balance both your family and your job?
There are five important steps that you need to take an order to find the balance between your family and your job. Prioritize your life, start with a goal and work backwards, communicate often, make consistent small steps, and celebrate!
Following these five steps will allow you to create mental space in your everyday life so that you can feel all of your efforts are paying off.
Work Backwards
You have to find your vision.
You have to have a goal that at the end of the day and know that this is where you want to be.
For me, I was starting a family with my partner and we decided that traditional jobs were not working for us.
We enjoyed having lots of time with each other and giving ourselves opportunities where we were more in control.
This meant I needed to go find a remote opportunity that would allow me to work at home. When I started this transition there was a lot of stress and a lot of work that I needed to do.
For my relationship, this was not easy. But knowing that there was a specific goal in mind that we were working towards help tremendously to get us to a better place.
We were always able to ask ourselves in moments of hardship, "is this aligned with where we want to be in life?"
There were also moments where we lost track of that vision and forgot about that vision.
These moments are the ones in which we felt the most pain. We didn't know what all the work was heading towards. It seems like we would have rather focused on being together.
It was hard for my partner and it was hard for me.
When you have a vision that you are working towards with your family, you are able to check to see if you are still aligned with that vision as you go through hard moments and you are also able to re-calibrate when needed.
Let's say your vision was to have the house on property for your family but you and your partner do not have jobs. Chances of you getting that house are not very good.
So if you go 2 months without having a job you can ask yourself if that aligns with your vision and if it does not then you can understand that either you or your partner will need to go find that job immediately.
It is a very simple example but I use that simplicity to help you understand that these are just decisions you and your family need to make. As long as you have your ultimate goal, those decisions become much easier to make together, as a family.
This is how you start to striking a good balance between your job and your family. As long as everybody has the same goals you will understand the work that needs to be done in order to reach those goals.
Now that doesn't mean that it makes the process easy….
You're going to find that you will still need to work incredibly smart and hard but that if you can follow these steps it won't always seem like a tug-of-war but more like everything is on the same side pushing towards the same direction.
Take Inventory
This part can be tricky because it involves being very vulnerable and very honest with yourself.
You need to look at where you were spending your time. This means tracking your time.
Did you spend an extra hour watching TV when it would have helped your family to plan out the next few days?
Did you choose to spend time with your family in the backyard when you knew that finishing a couple of extra freelancer gigs would have helped your family with bills at the end of the month?
Taking inventory means that you are aware of your situation and why you are taking the actions that you are.
This means that you will need to sacrifice some of your time in order to reach the goals that you outlined in the first step.
This is why having shared goals is so important. If you tell your partner or your children that you cannot spend time with them because you need to finish work, it is extremely important that they know the exact reason why it is that you need to work.
If you finishing work means that the family gets to take an extra vacation that year and that's the main goal, I guarantee that everybody will be working as hard as they can to make sure that they get that vacation.
But you can only know what you need to do if you have taken inventory of how you were spending your time.
Otherwise you will just be guessing and you will not know if your guesses are making any real difference to accomplishing your goal.
After you have take an inventory of your time and where you are spending it, it is important to continue to do this!
By tracking your time and taking inventory of where you are spending it. you can see exactly where you will need to make adjustments. This will give you SO MUCH power and control.
Give yourself an opportunity to fill in control of your balance between your family and your job.
Communication
This part of the process should really be done at every step.
There is no more single important factor in trying to find a good balance between family and job than communication.
Sometimes trying to figure out the balance between everything can be so overwhelming that we go to a place of isolation.
We sort of shut each other off in order to feel like we are concentrating harder or focusing more on our task.
Truth is, without the support you need you will not be able to accomplish the goals you have set.
It is so important that no matter how frustrating it can be to feel like neither your family or job is on your side, you understand fully that with their support, you can get to the exact places you want to be.
Communication is an obviously big part of that. And this does not mean that you communicate on logistics alone. You need to be communicating about how things feel bad, about how they feel scary, and about your insecurities.
There is another great article that has their own section on communication with your children that I recommend reading.
In my relationship I am the one who does the shutting down. I have a hard time communicating exactly how I feel. What that does is make my partner feel like we aren't on the same page. Like they don't know where I am and don't feel like the decisions we make are together.
When I do communicate about my feelings and let her know when spending too much time together takes away from the work, or when spending too much work is hurting the relationship, we feel we have a much better balance between our family and our jobs.
Sometimes that means that I am working more than spending time with her. Sometimes it means and I'm spending more time with her than I am on my job.
The point of finding the balance between family and job is not about equal time. It's about feeling that balance between family and your job.
Consistent Small Steps
Now that you have a goal you are working towards, you have identified how you were spending your time every day to accomplish those goals, you are communicating regularly with your family and so that everybody is always on the same page, it's time to just do the work.
Consistent small steps….
This is more of a philosophy in my life but I believe it pertains very much to finding that balance between your family and your job.
A mistake that many of us make when we are working towards our goals is to believe that we need to be making big gigantic steps.
For some reason we convinced ourselves that unless we have these big aha moments we are not truly making progress.
This is because it is hard for us to understand the progress that we are making while we are making it.
What I recommend is to set up a weekly system for yourself, if you have not already, that tells you what you need to do every single day.
I would also recommend identifying two to three important parts of your life that need to get done for that week.
As you go through the days, begin to check off, or delete, your to-do list.
Make sure that every day you are getting something done you are leading up to accomplishing the two to three most important parts of your life you need done for that week.
If you can do this week in and week out you will begin to see your life balance between family and your job changed dramatically.
The truth is that we only build momentum by staying consistent. The big changes and the life-altering changes will happen on their own. You do not need to do anything to make these happen.
You just need to worry about staying consistent and taking those small steps every day that lead to bigger goals every week that lead to bigger goals every year.
Of course you need to communicate with your partner and your children about your steps for the week and what you have decided is the most important part of that week.
This way everybody can understand that the actions you are taking every single day are leading up to that ultimate goal that the family is working so hard to get to.
Celebrate!
Now it's time to celebrate!
This is the part that most people seem to forget....
This is the part that I forget....
I get confused and begin to believe that I need to work all the time. I need to make sure that the family is taken care of that my work is taken care of and that we are living the best life we possibly can.
All of this anxiety leads me to never let go. It keeps me in this perpetual state of feeling like I am not enough. Like I can't give my family or work as much as I need to.
What snaps me out of this anxiety and what keeps me from going crazy is being present in the moment. Allowing myself to really appreciate what I have and where I am at that exact moment.
This means celebrating!
This means taking time to celebrate your accomplishments, your consistent small steps, your communication, your prioritization, and your ability to be honest with yourself.
Allow yourself to admire your partner, allow yourself to admire your children, allow yourself to take in your surroundings and environment, and of course, communicate that this is where everyone is at.
Because it is one thing for you to be able to let go, and another for your family to be able to let go.
But, if you have taken the steps above and your family knows exactly why you do what you do everyday and how much it contributes there shouldn't need to be much conversation about getting on the same page.
To me, this is when life gets really good. When you find that you are actually getting the balance between your family and your job.
We all work incredibly hard and We all love our families, there isn't any reason why you don't deserve to enjoy that.
Conclusion
1. Striking the perfect balance between your family and your job does not always mean that the time is equal. What it does mean is that you have set a goal, prioritized, and communicated on where you are in life to your family and your job to be comfortable with the actions you take every day.
2. If you want to find that balance then work smart and hard at small consistent steps. The big aha moments and big changes will come if you build up enough momentum. The only way to do that is to consistently show up to your goals.
3. DONT FORGET TO CELEBRATE! This is the best part of the process and most of us will feel guilty about it because we don't feel like we are enough. When you show up every week for those small consistent steps you need to have a nice dinner planned or a nice massage waiting.
If you found this post helpful and you received value from it then please like, comment, share, or message me personally and let me know how you felt.
I also found when writing this post that many people were wondering about this question in regards to an interviewer asking them during an actual interview. If you came looking for this type of answer them this article give some examples of scripts that you can say.
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